A Candy Coloured Clown They Call The Sandman

Tiptoes to my room every night.
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper,
"Go to sleep, everything is alright."

No,11 in my Sony Walkman Countdown, with 57 songs, is the sublime Roy Orbison. While a lot of Rock n' Roll in the '50s was comprised of macho posturing in T-shirt and jeans, turf wars, beer guzzling and womanising, Roy was pretty much out there on his own singing sweetly and tenderly about heartbreak and vulnerability. He also often sidestepped the conventions of four bar blues to write songs with incredibly complex structures. A good example would be my favourite Roy Orbison song, In Dreams, which has no verse and no chorus being, just like a dream, in constant flux. Magical. And I can think of no other singer from his era that employed such an incredible operatic range in his vocals; three octaves, apparently. Elvis Presley called him "the greatest singer in the world." Well, who am I to dispute The King?

Let's enjoy watching Roy singing Only The Lonely from A Black And White Night, an amazing concert of Roy Orbison supported by such musical emissaries as Bruce Springsteen, k.d. Laing, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello. A little bit of Heaven on Earth.

By the way, the image is from Sandman: Gallery Of Dreams, a DC one shot connected to Neil Gaiman's epic Sandman series, one of the greatest comic book series ever written, just as sublime as Roy Orbison's music. If ever Hollywood get around to making a Sandman movie - dare they? - then In Dreams would have to be somewhere on the soundtrack.